How vulnerable is our power supply?

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Hello, and welcome to the Inside Science podcast, you delightful, curious-minded humans.

This episode was first broadcast on Thursday, the 1st of May, 2025, and I'm Victoria Gill.

Today, we are bringing you insects and amphibians with surprising superpowers because we're finding out how cyborg cockroaches could help at the scene of a disaster, and if a strange, critically endangered salamander could hold the biological key to repairing a damaged spinal cord.

And science journalist Caroline Steele is here with with me, dissecting the science news for us.

Hello, Caroline.

Hi, Vic.

Thanks for having me back on.

Oh, you are always welcome.

What do you have in store for us?

So I've got a new version of the periodic table.

I've got some new research that suggests humans have evolved to survive mild burns at the expense of more severe ones.

And a sea lion that holds a beat better than humans.

An eclectic chocolate box of stories there.

Thank you, Caroline.

We'll be back with you shortly.

First, though, images from Spain earlier earlier this week looked like something from an apocalyptic Hollywood film.

A power outage across Spain and parts of France and Portugal stopped trains, prevented flights taking off, and even meant people couldn't get money out of their bank accounts.

A cyber attack has been ruled out as the cause, but it's still unclear what did trigger this widespread blackout.

All this is just a few weeks after a power outage that closed down the UK's biggest airport, Heathrow.

So this got the team here thinking about the power supply that we usually take for granted.

As we plug in more devices and electrify our energy systems, is the grid we rely on getting more vulnerable?

Joining me now to help answer that is Keith Bell, Professor of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Strathclyde.

Hi, Keith.

Hi.

Hello, welcome to Inside Science.

Also on the line, we have David Brayshaw, Professor in Climate Science and Energy Meteorology at the University of Reading.

Hi, David.

Hi, Hi, Rick.

Hello, and we have Caroline Steele with us as well for this conversation.

So, Keith, can I start with you?

Is there anything that we can say about how the grid works in Spain and how our grid works here in the UK

to

ask the question or answer the question about how vulnerable our power network is here?

Could we see something on that scale happen in the UK?

I mean the unfortunate answer is yes, we could see something of that scale happen here.

We could see that happen to any power system.

I mean it's impossible to guarantee 100%

reliability.

These are, you know, these are complex systems, you know, made up of all, I mean, hundreds of thousands, millions of individual devices all interacting with each other.

So that coordination, that interconnectedness across the system is what gives us access to cheaper energy.

It also normally provides secure supply because we've got, you know, when some power resources become unavailable, we've got access to others and we can, you know, trade across borders and all sorts.

But that interconnectedness also means that this sort of dynamic system, which is moving all the time, if you're like, every time we switch something on or off, it responds and almost kind of breathes.

So we have to be all the time paying attention to that.

And the good news is that power system engineers over decades have worked out methods based on a lot of kind of engineering modeling and analysis, simulation tools that do allow us almost, almost always, to make sure that these

big disturbances don't happen.

And there are conventions, similar conventions used all around the world.

of what we call n minus one security it's you know the system is designed and operated so that if there's one fault somewhere you know a power station comes offline for some reason, or there's a lightning strike on an overhead line or whatever it might be, there's enough margin that the system in effect can absorb that and carry on and it's still stable and all the demand can be met.

It's a question of checking that those systems are in place to put in a sort of a safety system when one thing goes wrong so it doesn't cascade the way it did in Spain.

And David, can I just ask you that there was an early theory about an unusual atmospheric phenomenon, essentially some strange weather playing a role in these power cuts.

In an increasingly unstable climate with more extreme weather, what does that mean to risks for our power supplies?

Well, I have to say, I don't know too much about the particular formula that was initially mentioned to do with this case in Spain.

But in general, I think one of the big changes of the energy system over the last decade or so has been it's fundamentally transformed.

It's changed the way it's sensitive to weather and climate variability.

We're relying much more heavily on solar and wind and those forms of generation.

Rather than the classical model where we had a relatively small number of large generation plants, we've now got an increasing number of generation sources that are only available when the resource is there.

So

it's kind of how to operate that system.

It becomes much more challenging and it changes the kind of events that will stress that system.

Caroline.

David, it sounds like it's much more of a challenge to incorporate all these different renewable energy sources into our power supply.

I wouldn't say it's necessarily necessarily more challenging.

It's a different way that they work.

So in the old days essentially you had a small number of these large units that you could more or less control up and down.

You could schedule them, you could predict when they're going to turn on and off, you could tell them when to do that.

And what you had to do there was to balance that with the

expected demand for power, which had some sensitivity to temperature but essentially behaviorally driven.

Whereas now we're moving to a world where the resources are available

when they are and the question is how do you balance those two elements together?

So it's just a different world.

It requires more effort to predict, I guess, and anticipate.

There are a wide variety of tools coming from my own community, the weather climate science community, that can help with that.

But the challenges and stress events that it's facing have changed substantially.

So Keith, how do you plan for that then, the sort of unpredictable weather and unpredictable climate?

You have to take account of the variability of how much wind and solar is available.

And also, if it's not available, how else do you you meet the demand for electricity and of course that varies on you know time scales of not just sort of hours and days but out out across years so so you're always looking at sort of a reasonable worst case and I guess one of the test tests for that is is what's commonly referred to as a donkel flauter literally the kind of dark doldrums with this period of time which could last for you know a couple of weeks when it's not very windy not very sunny what other resources have you got to bring on low carbon energy to meet the the electricity demand?

And actually, there are other periods when as we build out more and more wind and solar capacity, we would have actually surplus available energy.

You have to turn it down to make sure the grid is balanced second by second.

But could we make use of that?

Could we use that surplus renewable energy to, for example, make hydrogen using electrolysis, store the hydrogen in salt caverns at a scale of sort of for Britain, terawatt hours, and then take the hydrogen out of that salt cavern to turn it back into electricity during the Dunkel flouter.

Fascinating.

And if people take nothing else from this conversation, the word dunkel flouter

and trying to squeeze that into a conversation over the next week is going to be my challenge.

We're asking different things of our grid now, aren't we?

We're looking towards more electrification.

People are charging their cars rather than filling them up with petrol.

We've got

more devices being plugged in and charged.

What does that mean?

What does the different demands on the grid mean for it?

Yeah, it means that those models that David David mentioned about how you predict what the demand is going to be in different places and different times, those models have to be updated to take account of these different behaviors.

But they also give different opportunities.

So where previously we've had that scheduling of generation plant of production to match that forecast of demand.

Now we've got the potential for at least some of that demand to be scheduled or flexed in order to match the availability of the cheapest energy.

So when it's windy and sunny, that's when you want to do your electric vehicle charging.

And if something happens on the system, then if we've got well-insulated buildings, then you could potentially switch off some of the heating systems for a short period of time in order to help some of that system balance.

Because all the time, this is where this big engineering system is sensitive.

The production and the demand have to be balanced.

very closely at all times.

And it's where the sort of forecasts that David mentioned become important.

But yeah, all of that is coming.

And the system operators are making use of some of the new sort of forecasting techniques have been doing for quite a few years.

We've already in Britain got quite a high level of wind and solar generation.

So there's been already five, 10, 15 years of learning of how to do these things.

As David said, it's a case of, yeah, things are different, but the fundamental objective of operate the system in a stable, secure way that's n minus one secure is the same.

And David, with something like climate change, it almost seems like it's a sort of double-edged sword.

We're, you know, asking different things of the grid as we try to drive down our carbon emissions and electrify our energy systems.

But we also have climate change playing a role in making our weather more unpredictable and kind of changing the risks that are posed to our grid.

What's being done about that?

What's being planned?

I think one of the things that's been quite positive about this,

sort of the revolution of switching to more renewable in the system, has been a growing awareness that the weather and climate actually matters to power systems.

The key goal that a lot of my work builds towards is

historically there's been a bit of a disconnect between the energy research and the climate research, and trying to get those gears to mesh better.

I think is one of the key learnings out of all of this to kind of understand the risk as a whole rather than in two separate pieces.

Well, we'll be keeping a close eye on this investigation and we'll bring you more when we get some conclusions about what caused this situation in Spain.

But for now, Keith Bell and David Brayshaw and Caroline Steele, thank you all very much.

Now, when a powerful earthquake hits, time is of the essence.

Rescue workers need to get to the scene quickly and are often working amongst unstable, semi-collapsed buildings to try and save as many lives as possible.

After last month's devastating earthquake in Myanmar, there was one unusual team deployed in its very first rescue operation.

Ten cyborg cockroaches.

I'll let Gareth Mitchell explain.

In the rubble of collapsed buildings following the Myanmar earthquake crawls a cockroach.

But this insect is quite a bit bigger than the kind of thing we might see here in the UK.

It's about the length of one of your fingers.

And this roach has a backpack strapped to it.

The payload is a circuit board, a mini-computer, equipped with an infrared camera to detect body heat and help rescuers find humans trapped in the rubble.

This is a cyborg roach, according to the trio of Singapore research organisations behind it, and they're hailing the effort in Myanmar the first ever field deployment of cyborg cockroaches.

One of the organizations behind the work, a government agency called HTX, tells me: The team faced some technical issues but walked away from the deployment with some very valuable lessons that will help us improve the cyborg cockroaches for future deployments.

In all, the team deployed 10 machine-enhanced insects.

They haven't located any survivors, but the bots have helped map the area to help the human rescuers.

The insect of choice is the Madagascar hissing cockroach, known for its climbing abilities.

Its size, about six centimeters, puts it in the Goldilocks zone of big enough to carry a miniature computer, but small and nimble enough to crawl through tight spaces.

The team also favours this variety because there are existing research protocols for working with it.

The researchers published the early stages of this work in the nature journal NPJ Robotics last year.

The paper sets out in detail what happens when you mount a microcontroller onto an insect.

And guess what?

The The cockroach can be steered by the computer.

Electrodes send control signals via sensory organs at the back of the roach's abdomen.

Now left to their own devices the creatures sometimes get a bit disorientated and end up going around in circles when they hit a dead end, a bit like me in IKEA.

But the cyborg's camera feeds an onboard deep learning collision avoidance algorithm sending appropriate control signals through the cockroach's nervous system, steering it where it needs to go.

Well that's all well and good, but I still can't help thinking, why not just stick to fully-fledged robot rescue bots?

After all, there are quite a few out there already.

On the other hand, thanks to millions of years of evolution, nature has become very good at creating autonomous entities that can move in confined spaces and, importantly, do so incredibly energy-efficiently.

The cockroach keeps going on little more than carrots and water, freeing up more of the precious battery life for processing power and getting better image recognition and navigation.

So, my take on all of this?

Well, there's not a whole lot in the literature about hybrid robo-insects, I'll put it that way.

But I do love the deep learning obstacle avoidance algorithm at the heart of this research.

And I can imagine that benefiting all kinds of machines and systems, whether or not the cyborg-insect approach develops any further.

And if the future in rescue settings is perhaps to be more about robot robots and less about cyborgs, then maybe the good old cockroaches will all be left to scurry around in peace.

Technology journalist and broadcaster Gareth Mitchell there.

And you're listening to Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill.

BBC science journalist Caroline Steele is still with me with the science news that you need to know this week.

What do you have for us, Caroline?

So, first, I thought we could chat about a new version of the periodic table which could be used to massively improve atomic clocks.

Hmm, I don't know.

I'm a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to the periodic table.

I like Mandeleev's one, but go ahead.

Yeah, well, let's start with chatting a little bit about the original periodic table.

So it was invented by Dmitry Mandeleev, and he grouped chemical elements according to the number of protons in their nucleus.

So that's the number of positively charged particles in their nucleus.

And because elements in sort of the same part of the table share similar characteristics, the table was used to identify gaps and missing elements, which then went on to be discovered by chemists and has been, you know, super, super helpful.

Great for chemists, but not that great for some physicists who are looking for high-energy charged particles, for things like X-ray lasers and atomic clocks.

They're looking for different patterns.

Exactly.

Yeah, so they're looking for something slightly different.

But someone might have a solution to help with this.

So, Chun Hai Yu and his team at the Max Planck Institute in Germany have invented a new periodic table that doesn't sort of order chemical elements.

Instead, it groups ions.

And ions are atoms that have a charge.

So they've gained or they've lost an electron.

And so this new table groups ions according to the number of electrons it has.

So just like how chemists looked at the original periodic table for missing elements,

you can now have a look at this new periodic table for missing ions.

And Liu has identified 700 potential gaps where useful ions could exist.

Wow, and why are they what you need for improved atomic clocks?

Good question.

So first, let's quickly chat about how atomic clocks work.

So modern atomic clocks work by firing a laser of a specific frequency at an atom.

Then this atom will absorb the energy of the laser and one of its electrons will move from one shell to another.

So basically the energy from the laser gets transferred to an electron in the atom.

But this will only happen if the laser is at a precise frequency.

If it's not at the right frequency, this transition doesn't happen.

Which is really useful because if scientists see, oh, hey, this transition isn't happening, they can adjust the frequency of the laser so the laser can be kept at a specific frequency.

And because frequency is directly related to time, if we keep a laser at a precise frequency, we can keep precise time.

Our phones rely on atomic clocks, navigation systems rely on atomic clocks.

And for most of the atomic clocks we use today, they only gain one billionth of a second every day.

So from physics, you now have something completely different for us, Caroline.

Yeah, so using fire might have led to genetic changes that helped early humans survive minor burns, but it actually might make it harder to recover from severe burns.

Hmm, tell me more.

So we've been using fire for at least a million years, right?

And that puts us at risk of getting burnt, which is actually enough time for evolution to take place.

So a team of doctors and scientists at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and NHS Foundation Trust in London have been suspecting that burns from fire might have shaped our evolution.

Ah, and how have they investigated that?

So in a study recently published, they analyzed data on the genes expressed in both burnt and healthy skin in humans, and they identified 94 genes that were only expressed during burn healing.

So then they had a look at these 94 genes in humans and chimpanzees and found 10 specific genes that were really different between humans and chimpanzees.

And that basically suggested that the genes evolved a lot since our common ancestor.

And there were three genes that stood out in particular that promote pain sensation, which is important to avoid getting burnt, scar tissue formation, inflammation and wound closure.

And that would have helped early humans sort of rapidly close off smaller burns and fight off infection.

So what's the link with larger burns?

You mentioned at the top that there was that that might disadvantage our healing when the burns are more severe.

Yeah, exactly.

So inflammation and scar tissue, it sound entirely like good things, can actually make the healing of larger burns harder.

So inflammation on such a large area can actually damage tissue and scar tissue is sort of rigid and inflexible, so it's a problem if it covers a really significant part of your body.

So the same genes that promote the healing of minor burns might actually hinder the healing of major ones and that basically didn't matter from an evolutionary point of view because we didn't stand a chance of surviving a major burn.

Whereas now we do and this sort of part of our evolution evolution could actually be making treatment for major burns more complicated.

Better understanding of our genetics can help tailor treatment, but it is worth saying that this is sort of early stage research.

We need to look into it more, ideally comparing humans to other species, but very intriguing.

Indeed.

And you also promised me a story about a sea lion.

What do you have in sea lion news for me, Caroline?

So scientists have trained a sea lion to bob her head in time with a beat, and she's better at it than humans.

So we thought that musical ability was a uniquely human thing, but you might remember in 2009, a sulphur-crested cockatoo called Snowball danced to the Backstreet Boys on YouTube.

Oh, I remember Snowball.

Yeah, and the video has 9 million views, and interestingly, that actually inspired scientific research, which basically found that some birds that have the capacity for kind of vocal learning can keep a beat.

But we still thought it was only in birds that have a capacity for speech, essentially.

But then in 2009 in California, Ronan the sea lion was rescued by a scientist after she kept stranding herself on a highway.

Oh.

So she was taken in by a man called Peter Cook, and she was used as part of a study, which was looking at why sea lions were sort of stranding themselves at the time.

But Cook got to know Ronan, basically realised she was incredibly bright, and he was intrigued by this bird dancing science and decided to give it a go with Ronan.

I hope there's a video, Caroline.

There is.

People have got to have a look at it online.

And they work together at weekends and Cook taught Ronan to bop her head to the beat.

She got really good at it.

Apparently her favourite track is Earth Wind and Fire's Boogie Wonderland.

And so this was about a decade ago, but in fact, on Thursday, the 1st of May, a paper's been published in Scientific Reports where basically Ronan's ability was put to the test.

She was asked to bop her head in time to the beat of a snare drum at different speeds, and 10 students were asked to chop their hand to the same beat.

And it turns out Ronan was better at keeping the beat than all 10 students.

This is amazing.

On that musical note, thank you so much, Caroline Steele.

Please come back and give us an eclectic mix of science stories next time.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me on.

Always a pleasure.

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Now, finally, you may have heard some good news today about possibly my favourite animal.

I'm not talking about my dog, Herbert, but about the Mexican axolotl.

This is a perpetually smiling, feathery-gilled salamander that lives in the wetlands and canals of Zochimilco, close to Mexico City.

Back in 2018, I met Dr.

Luis Zambrano from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Zochimilco, where he was working to save this strange salamander from extinction.

This is one of the places that I like to come when I am sap, basically, because it's one of the places in Zochimilco where you can see how traditional agriculture has been developed in the last 2,000 years and you can see birds and you will see this refuge for asholotos.

Achillotus refuge basically is that we use these channels that are around the Chinampas, these areas where the Chinamperos grow

and we can semi-isolate them easily if we build a semi-permeable dam.

So we build this filter with the Chinamperos and then you will have a nice environment that is actually the same environment that they used to have 50, 60, 70 years ago.

So we are not creating something new.

We are restoring the things that used to happen about 70 years ago.

Luis Zambrano there.

And it's taken a few years, but there's been an exciting development.

To see if captive-bred axolotls could be brought back to their native habitat, the team has released and tracked 18 of the animals in Zochimilco and at another artificial wetland close to the city.

I caught up with Alejandro Ramos, who's one of the lead researchers in this axolotl rescue mission.

Our monitoring period was like over 40 days, and all axolots survived.

So that was really, really cool.

But also when we recaptured, they had gained weight.

So that shows you that they're eating well and that it happened in both habitats.

So yeah, that was really good result.

And also we got a bunch of information that is going to help

the restoration project in the future.

I don't know, Victoria, if you've heard this, but like in Mexico, like we made one of our currency, one of our bills.

It has an axolot now.

This is fairly new, but once it came out, people loved it so much that they didn't want to spend it.

And like, this even became an issue, no, because people were not spending that.

So

I just think

there's so much love for the axolots from all over the world.

So many people.

I think there would be many people very sad if we don't save the wild axolot.

Dr.

Alejandro Ramos there.

Now, there's a bizarre scientific scientific irony around the axolotl because there are about one million of them in labs and home aquariums around the world.

Because they're not just cute cultural icons, they also have some extraordinary biological qualities that researchers want to get to the bottom of.

Here's Dr.

Ida Rodrigo Albor from the University of Edinburgh.

I work with axolotls.

What is it like to work day in, day out with axolotls?

I love axolotls, by the way.

I'm not even going to pretend to be impartial on this.

I have to say, it's very, very interesting because obviously, there is no any other creature in this planet that can do what an axolotl can do.

For example, seeing an arm regenerating or the whole tail regenerating, I think, is quite fascinating to me and to almost anyone I've talked with.

Yeah, and so that's why they're so interesting for your research into regenerative medicine, which

we'll come on to.

But can we just talk about the axolotls?

Surely.

First of all, how did you get into research that directly involves these animals?

How did you come to have them in your lab?

I started working with axolotls when I was a PhD student and I decided to go from Spain to Germany to do my PhD and try to understand how the axolotl regenerates the spinal cord.

And I found this very fascinating because spinal cord injuries in humans are permanent, but these animals can fully regenerate their spinal cord.

So I packed my suitcase and I went to Germany and I did my PhD with Elitanaka in Dresden.

So what are you trying to understand in your research, sort of that ability is?

What's the link there between being able to apply that medically and understanding it in axolotls?

What are you trying to find out?

Yeah, so we are trying to understand how the stem cells of the spinal cord in the axolotl are able to sense that injury and how they change in response to the injury and then essentially rebuild the spinal cord.

Because the exact same cell type, it might not be exactly the same, but it's the equivalent cell type also exists in all other vertebrates like mice or humans.

So, we try to understand

how are these cells in the axolotl different to these cells in the mice, and can we use insights from the axolotl to sort of like unlock that regenerative capacity in mouse or even human equivalent cells?

So, almost if you could reprogram those mouse cells to become more axolotl-like?

Exactly.

And what have you discovered in your studies of axolotl spinal regeneration?

What are you most excited about that you've found out by studying these animals?

So we found something quite remarkable I think and that is that these cells even though they are very specialized cells and they have a function in the adult axolotl upon injury they can sort of like adopt an embryonic like state and resemble the cells that during development build the spinal cord in the first place.

So they really have that ability to rewind, go back in time, to recapitulate what they did once in the embryo to build the spinal cord.

And what I found also is that in the mouse, these cells also try to go back in time, but they cannot go so far back to be able to support regeneration efficiently.

So they are sort of like stuck in a state that doesn't go back to a fully regenerative state.

That is fascinating.

And what are you doing right now?

What questions are you asking and how are you working with the axolotls?

We are going to use new technology that is available where we can look at individual cells and the genes that they expressed before injury and during this process of reprogramming into a more regenerative state.

And we can also do this in the mice.

And because we'll get a comprehensive set of genes, we can really try to find out differences between them and then try to bring these genes that are differently regulated in in axolotls into mice to see if we can actually unlock that capacity to regenerate.

To see if you can almost reprogram the activation of those genes in that process.

Wow.

Ada, thank you so much.

It's great to have you on the programme.

Thank you, Big, it was a pleasure.

And that is all we have time for this week.

Thank you to Caroline Steele and to all of our contributors.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill.

The producers were Dan Welsh and Claire Salisbury.

Technical production was by Matt Chamberlain, and the show was made in Cardiff by BBC, Wales and West.

And don't forget, you can get in touch with the program by email at insidescience at bbc.co.uk.

But until next week, thank you for listening and bye-bye.

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